Tuesday, May 27, 2014

There are several ways to add video to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite projects. This blog post assumes that you want to add a video that will stream into the article from YouTube, and you want the video to play full screen when tapped. Video configured this way will require the user to have an internet connection. If you want the video to play within a frame of a specific size within your layout, see this previous post.

1. Create your layout in InDesign, place a high-qulity still image, or a screen shot from a selected frame of the video in the layout. The size and location of this image can be anything you want, since the video is going to play full-screen.

2. Locate the video on YouTube that you wish to embed.

3. On the YouTube page beneath the video, click on Share, and then click on Embed.

4. Select only the portion of the embed code that is highlighted in blue below, and copy it to the clipboard

5. In InDesign, select the frame from step 1, and select the Go To URL action

6. Paste the text you copied in step 4 into the URL field, directly after the http://

7. Add some artwork to indicate that the user can tap the image to play the video.

That’s it. Now when the user taps the image, the web browser that is built into DPS will overlay the page content, with the YouTube video queued up and ready to play. Then the user will need to tap again to play the video.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

There are several ways to add video to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite projects. This blog post assumes that you want to add a video that will stream into the article from YouTube, and you want the video to play in within a frame of a specific size in your layout. Video configured this way will require the user to have an internet connection.

Technically, what you will be doing is “embedding” a streaming YouTube video in your DPS article. There are a couple of different ways to do this. Google occasionally changes the way this video embedding works, but this is the best way at the time of this writing.

1. Create your layout in InDesign, and create a frame on the page that is the exact dimensions that you want the video. Make a note of the width of this frame in pixels.

2. Locate the video on YouTube that you wish to embed.

3. On the YouTube page beneath the video, click on Share, and then click on Embed.

4. Still on the YouTube page, choose “Custom Size” for the the Video size, and enter the width of your InDesign frame, and make note of the value that is generated for the height.

5. Select only the portion of the embed code that is highlighted in blue below, and copy it to the clipboard

6. In InDesign, select the frame you drew in step one, and click on Web Content in the Folio Overlays panel.

7. Paste the embed code into the URL field of the Folio Overlays panel

8. Use the left-arrow key on the keyboard to move the cursor to the start of the URL you just pasted, and type http: immediately before the double slash in the url.

9. Select the Auto Play, Allow User Interaction, and Scale Content to Fit options. The Auto Play option will not cause the video to auto play, but will only cause the video to load into the frame automatically.

10. Change the height of the frame to match the value that YouTube generated in step 4.

11. That’s all that is required. You won’t see anything other than an empty frame in InDesign, but when you preview the article, you’ll see a single frame of the video along with the YouTube play button. Tapping anywhere in the video frame will play the video.

12. Usually, the random frame from the video that YouTube displays isn’t attractive. So I prefer to return to the YouTube website, play the video full-screen on my computer, and take a screen shot of a good frame from the video. Then I place that screen shot on top of the Web Content frame in InDesign, along with some artwork that looks like a play button. Then, I deselect the Auto Play option for the video frame. I’ve offset the screen shot in the image below so that you can see that it is separate artwork on top of the Web Content frame. Now, when the page is displayed, the user will see the screen shot image. When the user taps the screen shot, the Web Content will “play” and load the video, and Web Content frame will jump to the front and obscure the screen shot. Then the user will need to tap again to play the YouTube video. Another benefit of this approach is that the user will see the screen shot even if they don’t have an internet connection.

Thursday, May 08, 2014

Today Adobe announced the availability of a new, free iPad app called Adobe Voice. This super simple app is for creating what David Pogue calls “explainer videos”. I don’t think I can possibly overstate how simple this app is to learn and use. The learning curve is about 5 minutes, tops.

From the time I installed the app, it took about 30 minutes to hammer together the basics of the video below, (and then another 45 minutes tweaking it because I’m obsessive!).

I can see a wide range of uses for this…not to mention that school kids will be all over this.

InDesign CS5 and later has an obscure keyboard/mouse maneuver that allows you to create multiple duplicates of an object as you drag. Here’s how:

1. Select one or more objects with the Selection tool

2. Hold down the option key (Mac) or alt key (Windows), and THEN grab one of the selected objects. It is very important to hold down the option/alt key BEFORE you grab any of the objects.

3. Begin dragging the object(s) horizontally or vertically, and you’ll see a duplicate of the object appear, because you’re holding down the option/alt key

4. While continuing to hold down option/alt, hit the right arrow or up arrow key on the keyboard once to create one duplicate, twice to create 2 duplicates, three times to create 3 duplicates, etc. You will see a dotted outline appear on the screen indicating that duplicates are being created.

5. When the correct number of duplicates is positioned the way you want them, release the mouse and the option/alt key

Note that this is a different technique than the more well-known technique of being able to tap the up-arrow and right-arrow keys while dragging out a frame on the page to create a grid of boxes, or while dragging out a frame with the loaded place cursor. The technique I’m describing above is useful when the object or objects you want to duplicate are already on the page, and now they need to be duplicated or stepped and repeated.

Thursday, May 01, 2014

Did you know that you can open PDFs in Microsoft Word 2013 for Windows? Just choose File > Open, select a PDF, and you’ll see the following dialog box before the PDF is converted to editable Word text:

PDFs that have complex layout will change in appearance significantly. If you don’t have the original fonts, they will be automatically be substituted with fonts on your system. In my limited tests, the conversion was far from perfect. But if you are working in Word, and just need to crack open a PDF to copy and paste some text, this could be useful.

As you would expect, PDFs that have password security applied can’t be opened with Word.

For an alternate way to convert PDFs to Word, see PDF2Office (and PDF2ID) from Recosoft. If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can open the PDF in Acrobat Pro and choose File > Save As Other > Microsoft Word.